Ok, in the spirit of totally misleading advertising, I thought I'd just start with a misleading head line, now I've got your attention I'll tell you the real story and some will find this an interesting read...

Yes - you guessed it, the 2Deg network didn't suddenly get faster, I just got an updated phone to play with. Nothing to flash, LG-P500h.

However, compared to the 8150u that I have been using, it's a big difference, especially with web browsing, so much so that I thought I'd share.

Quick heads up for the 2Deg team, these things, as I'm sure you guys all know are ex-'another provider' phones, and mine was a ex-repair so who really knows what state it was in.

The guys at Noel's didn't know how to get it to connect to 2Deg data. Quick check of the GZ thread, of course I quickly discovered it's as simple as choosing the SIM tools thing and away you go. Big Ups to Salty and his team, that really is a very cool feature, it 'Just works'(tm) - something that I'm sure you already know and greats you with no surprise and you're just nodding politely while reading my morning coffee rant.

Sox don't take so long to pull on a fresh set, but phones are painful, though I'm very sure that there's a host of cool features about Android that mean that I could have done the transition much quicker than I managed to.

I had to reinstall all my apps from the market. There was no option to just 'hey this is my new phone, put my crap on it please" that I'm aware of. I'm sure I'm wrong.

I just discovered that you can push a app at the phone from the market when using your laptop/desktop.

I transferred over my 2Gb SD card, which took my music but didn't bring my apps and settings.

But what happens if I loose my phone?

Yes, this post is really a call for education, and an article to get others thinking about the question.

Should providers be running paid or free classes on how to set up your Android properly? Why not? My wife's doing a cooking class... why not an Android class? ...or do these things already exist and my problem is really my education of education?

Back to my phone... what happens if I loose it. Last night I sat with two side by side and just ticked things off as I installed them and set them up.

SipDroid works again!

SipDroid and 2Talk just keep getting better and better, but I will confess that as I got to grips with my 8150u over the past 12 months I just drowned it in apps and that hammered real time stuff like SipDroid and I simply couldn't run Skype.

Talking of Skype, this brings me back to the whole settings thing... can I push all that junk into the cloud, including passwords and have it all secure under 1 master password so I can just suck it all back onto one new bit of hardware?

Again, I'm sure the answer is yes... I just don't have that learning yet.

Back to 2Degrees...

I really did feel like the whole network just got faster... but of course that speculation is just silly.

What really happened is I got a handset that could process the data that 2deg is throwing at me faster.

This is something I think we all forget time and time again about data delivery.

We're all crying out for faster broadband - 100mbit... but would that be helpful? If we spend $200 a month to get 100mbit, will that then take away from the budget for more hardware to make use of it or are we all going to need to just budget $200 for bb and $400 for hardware to take advantage?

My new problem...

Now of course I still have a perfectly good 8150u... well, I still have a perfectly good T2100 laptop as well... so the term 'perfectly good' needs some attention... it occurs to me, how am I going to start 're-purposing' smart phones?

For the geek...

if WAF>0 then W = W + (LG-P500h + 2Deg Sim) - VF;

...so it's going to be an interesting year!

{MOD EDIT : SP : Made the title more relevant and moved to the Android forum as it is more relevant}

"I just discovered that you can push a app at the phone from the market when using your laptop/desktop."

Hold on what? I can browse the market on my laptop and push the app to my phone?

Is this by wifi or what?

sorry to go off topic but can you PM me on this perhaps?

Also in regards to restoring apps, contacts etc, doesnt this happen when you login to gmail on the phone?

Ive flashed my phone a few times and after a while all my apps just appear because they are restored from gmail... I dont know how to make this happen straight away thou - for me its happened after a day or two... I quickly discovered that this is not a good thing when going from 2.2 to 2.3 but thats another issue...

If you sign into the android market with your gmail account, you can find an app, select it for download, and seconds later it will begin downloading and installing onto your phone.

I have the Vodafone/2D L500 and have no issues with random power offs etc that the Telecom people are experiencing. Also I've heard some have issues with the wifi dropping in and out, but that maybe related to a few things, like wifi sleep settings or getting the password wrong etc.

I found the original post hard to read, but the concepts are in there and worth discussing.

Yes this is one of the first things I think people need to twig to, how to turn off network data.

Android 2.3xx Under settings, first option is Wireless and networks, so select this. Right down the bottom is Mobile networks, so select this. First option here is Data enabled? Make sure this is ticked off.

Then your phone will only get data via wifi. I'm on prepay and am loving using my phone for data at home and at key hotspots, but knowing it's just a phone for calls/texts when out and about.

There's also an icon for this at all times via the top drag down menu too. Via these methods you can opt to use the more expensive mobile data when you want, or ensure it's prevented when you don't want it.

Not that's it's probably very helpful, but putting the CyanogenMod 7 custom firmware onto that phone makes a HUGE improvement to the performance of it. I got one for the girlfriend and found it to be a complete dog to use (bearing in mind that my usual phone is a Samsung Galaxy S2 which is substantially more powerful) - after some (very non-trivial) hackery, I got CM7 onto it and it turned into a perfectly acceptable little phone with quite impressive battery life (especially given she rarely has 3G/WiFi enabled).

It pays to turn WiFi off when you're not actually using it or it'll continually hunt for a network to connect to and uses a fair bit of battery.

Jaxson: Yes this is one of the first things I think people need to twig to, how to turn off network data.

Android 2.3xx Under settings, first option is Wireless and networks, so select this. Right down the bottom is Mobile networks, so select this. First option here is Data enabled? Make sure this is ticked off.

Then your phone will only get data via wifi. I'm on prepay and am loving using my phone for data at home and at key hotspots, but knowing it's just a phone for calls/texts when out and about.

There's also an icon for this at all times via the top drag down menu too. Via these methods you can opt to use the more expensive mobile data when you want, or ensure it's prevented when you don't want it.

Does this method still allow MMS messages? Pretty sure when I used to do that, I wasn't able to send but I could've had something else mucked up. I on 2degrees and MMS has a separate APN, so I just change the internet APNs (with APNdroid) to disable mobile data.

Good point bazzer, I haven't tried to be honest. I'll run some tests. I've just sent a picture attached to a text message, so I'll see if they can see it and reply with a picture as well. Will see what comes back.

Yeah I'm using a P500. Used the stock froyo rom for about 2 hours, updated to the offical GB rom ,used that for about a day. I then flashed CM7, which totally transformed the phone.Twice the battery life and way faster. Now I'm using a CM9 beta, most things work and it's faster still, and getting around 3 days out of the battery with moderate use. Overclocked to 806mhz, it's fantastic. I also upgraded from a u8150. Put a custom ROM on the damn thing, you won't regret it